Sweatshops at Sea: Most of Our Goods Arrive Via Ships Where Seafarers Labor in Unfair and Dangerous Conditions

By Stan Cox

Late last year, the Danish shipping giant AP Moller Maersk announced robust third-quarter profits of $2.25 billion. To get the good word out, the company's chief operating officer sent a message to his crews aboard ships around the world, inviting them to join him in celebration by having a piece of traditional Danish lagkage, a kind of cream cake.

Mark Dickinson, head of the Nautilus International seafarers' union, scoffed at the boss's invitation, comparing it to French monarch Marie Antoinette's infamous "let them eat cake" comment. Noted Dickinson, "The profits have been achieved on the back of job losses for highly skilled and experienced personnel, and cuts in operating costs that have left some ships with food budgets that would barely run to covering the costs of cooking cream cakes."

The United States is no longer a major seafaring nation, but we have become increasingly dependent on the volatile global shipping industry. Cargo vessels registered in the United States and Canada account for only 1 percent of global shipping capacity; however, a far larger share of world cargo traffic moves to or from our ports. North America laps up 27 percent of all oil traded internationally, and one of every five filled shipping containers worldwide is headed either away from or (more often) toward the United States. And to help reduce our trade deficit, 44 percent of all grain entering international trade is shipped from a U.S. port.

Where Has All The Water Gone?

Mankind is moving buckets and buckets of water from land to the ocean.

Sometimes science moves slowly and sometimes quickly. This is an instance of quick.

A couple of weeks ago TheGreenGrok covered a paper by Tajdarul Syed of the University of California, Irvine, et al who used hydrologic data to estimate the rates at which water flowed from the continents to the sea. They found that the rate rose over the study period from 1994 to 2006 and that the strongest component of that increase was an increase in evaporation over the ocean. The authors noted that such trends, if they continue into the future, would be evidence of an intensification of the hydrologic cycle, in which increased evaporation over the ocean leads to increased precipitation over the continents and subsequently more river discharge into the ocean.

While I had some reservations about the study -- recognizing, as the authors did, that the time period wasn't sufficiently long enough to draw conclusions about changes in the hydrologic cycle, and finding there were uncertainties in the numbers they derived -- I generally saw the paper as but another confirmation of the fact that our climate is changing. (To be clear, the findings of Syed et al were and are in no way central to the climate change issue but in line with it.)

But a new piece of the puzzle has been added with a report just out in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by Yoshihide Wada of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues. And that new piece calls into question the conclusions of Syed et al.

The Wada et al paper is about groundwater, but before we get to the specifics, a little background.